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From the Herald:

Ricky Ross promises a taste of Scotland this weekend
Keith Bruce

Published on 26 Nov 2009

It is only a couple of days before he is due to headline Homecoming Live’s Final Fling at Glasgow’s SECC, but I eventually run Ricky Ross to ground in Damascus.

When the Syrian branch of the Deacon Blue fan club asks you to speak at their 20th anniversary dinner, it must be hard to say no.

I jest. That invitation never came, in point of fact, but the scenario is believable just the same. Deacon Blue’s bill-topping slot tomorrow is justified not just by a quintet of top five albums between 1989 and 1994 but by their continuing popularity as a live band when the four original members (Ross, his wife Lorraine McIntosh, drummer Dougie Vipond and keyboard player Jim Prime) can be coaxed away from their other careers. Between Christmas and New Year, for example, the band will be playing vast auditoriums in Ireland.

Damascus, however, may yet be unconverted and Ross’s presence there was for domestic reasons. When we spoke he was holed up in an airport hotel with daughter Eren, having gone to Syria to visit her older sister Caitlin, now 21 and a student of Arabic. Considering their return flight had been cancelled, Ross seemed remarkably calm for a man facing a very busy weekend.

The Final Fling is rather less than the half of it. As must be apparent to anyone who has scanned the extensive list of bands who are taking part – Deacon Blue follow Kevin McDermott, James Grant, The Bluebells, Midge Ure, Lloyd Cole, Hue and Cry and The Skids onto the stage of the Clyde Auditorium – none of them are playing for very long. The set list Ross has wrestled with extends to just four songs. He is coy about what’s on it, but all will have a distinctly Scottish flavour and the final one is perhaps rather less obvious than many will expect, he says. There’s a teaser.

But the day after the Deacon Blue appearance, Ricky and Lorraine are on stage again at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, playing material they are rather less familiar with and in entirely new arrangements. This year, as McIntosh Ross, the couple released a fine new album, The Great Lakes. Songs of arresting simplicity that seem the apotheosis of Ross’s life-long obsession with Americana, they were put in the hands of Bafta-winning TV music composer Paul Leonard Morgan, who has written the score to the Neil Oliver-presented History of Scotland series, currently having a controversial first terrestrial telly screening on BBC 2.

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is playing the music it recorded for the series as its contribution to the Homecoming/St Andrew’s Day festivities at the Usher Hall on Sunday. As well as the composer’s commissioned score, the programme includes the only Scottish performance so far of the God Help the Girl project by Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, featuring the three female singers and orchestral arrangements by the band’s Mick Cooke. On top of that, Paul Leonard Morgan has made orchestral arrangements of three of the McIntosh Ross songs from The Great Lakes – the title track, Walls and McIntosh’s This World Is Not My Home.

“The arrangements are very simple, to match the songs,” says Ross, who was happy to share the selection with Morgan. “It’s always better if someone reacts and he did come back and ask us to change a choice of song.”

Ross is no stranger to collaboration, of course, as his main occupation these days is as a songwriter for hire to some of the biggest names in pop. He has provided his professional services to James Blunt, Ronan Keating, Emma Bunton and Will Young. And Ricky Ross co-credits have recently cropped up on the new albums by Nanci Griffiths and Jamie Cullum.

Of late, he worries that his own music has meant that he hasn’t been quite busy enough.

“It’s my bread and butter and I’ve done less writing this year than in the last eight and no collaborations since April,” he worries, although work that he has done in the past is surfacing alll the time.

That includes Cullum’s radio-friendly single I’m All Over It, which launched his new album The Pursuit. Ross’s involvement explains the song’s surprisingly catchy qualities, but curiously the young jazz pianist didn’t think that worth mentioning when he spoke to The Herald.

“The record company had asked him to revisit the record,” Ross explains,” because they couldn’t hear a single. We got on very well and he was working in LA at the same time as we were doing The Great Lakes. I think he did one song in the time we did the album!”

Most recently, McIntosh and Ross have been on the road with their own music and Dundee musician Jed Grimes, formerly of Danny Wilson, has now joined Deacon Blue on bass, with Mick Slaven continuing on lead guitar alongside the old stalwarts.

Clearly Ross’s appetite for music of his own has been whetted, because he does not rule out the possibility of new work from his old band.

“You can only do so much with the greatest hits,” is how he puts it, “and it would be nice to have something new to play. It’s tricky to get everyone together, but I’d quite like it if we had new songs to do.”

Deacon Blue play the Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow, tomorrow as part of Homecoming Live – The Final Fling. McIntosh Ross join the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall tomorrow.